Washington Decoded

From Saigon to Kabul to Kyiv: Peace with Honor

 

By Merle Pribbenow

 

    I was assigned to the US Embassy in Saigon when an acrimonious meeting between Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s national security advisor, and South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu took place on 22 October 1972, sixteen days before the US presidential election. Kissinger was trying to force Thieu to agree to a ceasefire agreement he had negotiated privately with the North Vietnamese in Paris, without South Vietnamese government participation. This agreement did not require the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnamese territory and did not provide any clearly spelled-out security guarantees by the US government.[1]

    Unlike the scene in the White House on 28 February 2025 that was televised live to the entire world, the heated argument between Kissinger and Thieu was conducted behind closed doors, largely invisible to the outside world. But there are uncanny similarities between the Kissinger-Thieu confrontation in Saigon and the one that took place 52 years later in the White House, during a meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymar Zelenski and President Donald Trump, with Vice-President J.D. Vance and others in attendance. In both cases, the key point of contention was the effort by the United States to pressure a weaker ally (South Vietnam in the first case and Ukraine in the second) into entering into a ceasefire agreement with an implacable foe (North Vietnam in the first case and Russia in the second) without solid, clearly-enunciated US security guarantees that would be activated if the other side violated the agreement.

    The strategy of the other side (North Vietnam in 1972 and Russia today) also appears to be very similar, with the aim in each case being to reach an agreement that would permanently end US military involvement/military support to its ally, leaving the other side free to resume the fighting and defeat a weakened opponent who has been stripped of the US support that it desperately requires.

    The following is an excerpt from a 2004 Vietnamese publication that consists of a collection of articles written by a number of Vietnamese communist cadres and leaders who were directly involved in the 1972-73 peace negotiations.

    The publication, which was prepared under the aegis of the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and edited by Vu Son Thuy, is titled The Diplomatic Front During the Paris Talks on Vietnam and was published by the National Political Publishing House, Hanoi, in 2004. Included in this work is an article written by Major General Doan Huyen, entitled “Defeating the Americans: Fighting and Talking.”

    General Huyen writes that during the summer of 1972 he was assigned to a North Vietnamese Politburo strategic policy planning committee called CP50, which was responsible for formulating plans for North Vietnam’s negotiations with Washington to reach a peace agreement with the United States and its South Vietnamese ally. He says that in mid-September 1972, after South Vietnam’s armed forces, with heavy US air and naval gunfire support, finally recaptured Quang Tri City, the only South Vietnamese province capital to be occupied by North Vietnamese forces, he and his fellow author CP50 analysts recommended that the North Vietnamese negotiators should lower their goals for a peace agreement by abandoning half of their previous demands for an agreement. North Vietnam’s previous requirements for its agreement to a peace deal had been, first, a total withdrawal of all US military forces from the Vietnam conflict, and second, the replacement of the current South Vietnamese government with a “neutralist” coalition government.

    General Huyen goes on to write:

    We . . . recommended that we should lower our demands, to some extent at least, on the South Vietnamese political issue. This was an issue of great contention between our side and Kissinger, and it involved the governmental structure in South Vietnam: Should we require the establishment of a tripartite coalition government, a government of national reconciliation, or a Committee For the Peaceful Reconciliation of the Nation [an impotent quasi-governmental organization]?

    CP50 Chief Nguyen Co Thach agreed with the way I and the other CP50 specialists had presented the problem. He briefed Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh and recommended that the Politburo meet to provide its thoughts on this matter.

    On the day of the meeting, after participating in the Politburo discussion Thach returned and briefed us on the thinking of the Politburo and the decision it had made. Without providing any additional analysis of the situation, he told us of the conclusion that Communist Party First Secretary Le Duan had reached. Le Duan had said, “If we want to speed up the negotiations in Paris and sign an agreement before November 1972 (meaning before the US presidential election), we must concentrate our efforts on doing whatever it takes to resolve our primary objective, which is “to fight to force the Americans to withdraw.” The achievement of our first objective will create the conditions necessary for us to subsequently attain our second objective, “to fight to make the puppets collapse.” [Translator’s Comment: Duan was referencing the late Chairman Ho Chi Minh’s famous formulation of North Vietnam’s war strategy: “Đánh cho Mỹ cút, đánh cho nguỵ nhào.” [“Fight to make the American get out, fight to topple the [South Vietnamese] puppets”].

    As a result, Thach said, during the upcoming round of negotiations our side had to firmly grasp the two requirements that we had to meet in order to attain our first [primary] objective:

1. Completely and permanently end all US military involvement in South Vietnam; end the American war in South Vietnam; achieve the complete withdrawal of all American and satellite [allied] troops from South Vietnam; and end the bombing and mining of North Vietnam.
2. [North] Vietnamese armed forces in South Vietnam would be frozen in the positions they currently held. Under no circumstances would North Vietnamese troops be withdrawn from anywhere, and under no circumstances would there be any regrouping and withdrawal of troops similar to what had been done under the terms of the 1954 Geneva Agreement.

    The achievement of these two requirements would lead to the official recognition that, in practical terms, there were in fact two governments, two armies, and two zones of control [in South Vietnam].

    This would create a new balance of forces that would be extremely favorable to our side and these favorable conditions would allow us to continue the struggle to achieve our second objective [emphasis added].[2]

    The Taliban appears to have followed this same strategy in its negotiations with the first Trump administration. Those negotiations resulted in the “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban and the United States of America,” signed by the Taliban and the Trump administration on 29 February 2020. That agreement, like the 1973 Paris agreement on Vietnam, was also negotiated separately between the United States and the other side (in this case, the Taliban), and without the involvement of the pro-US Afghan government. That agreement, like the “peace” agreement in Vietnam almost five decades earlier, was supposedly intended to bring peace to Afghanistan, first, through a ceasefire and the withdrawal of all US forces, followed by a negotiated peaceful “political settlement” between all the different Afghan parties. The ultimate outcome of the Afghanistan settlement, like the outcome of the January 1973 Vietnam peace agreement, was the complete defeat of our erstwhile allies and total victory for America’s opponents.[3]

    It is interesting how the North Vietnamese strategy described above, like the strategy employed by the Taliban just five years ago, appears to uncannily parallel the ceasefire strategy that is currently being pursued by Russian President Vladimir Putin. He seems to have learned valuable lessons from the Soviet Union’s Vietnamese allies and from Afghanistan’s Taliban, while President Trump and his MAGA supporters appear to have forgotten (or to have intentionally ignored) the painful lessons that should have been learned by the United States from the ignominious outcome of the January 1973 Peace Agreement that the US forced upon its South Vietnamese ally.

 

Merle Pribbenow is a retired CIA operations officer and Vietnamese linguist who served in Vietnam 1970-1975.

 

[1] Kissinger provides a very short and very watered-down summary of his 22 October 1972 meeting with Thieu in Henry Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America’s Involvement in and Extraction from the Vietnam War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 364-366. For an admittedly biased South Vietnamese account of Kissinger’s confrontation with Thieu, see Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold Schecter, The Palace File (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).

In addition, two backchannel messages summarizing the 22 October 1972 meeting between Kissinger and Thieu can be found here and here in the US State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series. These summaries, however, fail to fully reflect the acrimony of the exchanges between Kissinger and Thieu.

[2] Vu Son Thuy, ed., The Diplomatic Front During the Paris Talks on Vietnam (Hanoi: National Political Publishing House, 2004), 135, 139.

[3] For the official US State Department text of this agreement, click here.

©2025 by Merle Pribbenow

Trump and the JFK Collection: What More to Come?

 

By Robert Reynolds

 

    The JFK Assassination Records Collection (ARC) returned to the news in 2024, with then presidential-candidate Donald Trump claiming credit for releasing stacks of withheld records during his first term, and vowing to release what remained during a second term.

    Trump did indeed open many records from the collection in 2017-2018. But his administration left thousands of records redacted as well, and the release process itself was less than transparent, with press speculation and anonymous second- or third-hand sourcing taking the place of documentation and comprehension.

    Following Trump 1.0, the Biden administration also had a crack at the records, restoring much text that had been redacted from documents, but still leaving blanks in as many as 3,000 records. That gave Trump 2.0 one more chance to tantalize the public with the prospect of new revelations.

    What are the prospects for more releases? In the past, the dearth of information on the Trump 1.0 releases made it hard to prognosticate how release of the small remaining set of redacted records might play out. Fortunately, a Freedom of Information request to the National Archives has made new documentation available on the 2017-2018 release process, shedding useful light on future releases.[1]

    More releases will certainly come, but what about prospects for revelations? There has been more than enough time to sift through and weigh the meaning of the increasingly elusive redactions in the collection, and as the fortune-telling 8 ball says, “Outlook not so good.”

Releasing JFK Records: A Look Back

    The JFK Assassination Records Collection (ARC) is the US government’s primary collection of records on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, subsequent investigations of Kennedy’s death, and the cold war background of the assassination.

    The collection was established by the 1992 JFK Act, which gave final custody of the records to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The act also created a limited-term federal board, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), to secure, review, and oversee the release of the records. By the time the Board closed its doors in 1998, it had placed more than 300,000 records in the collection, about 88 percent of which were released in full.

    Why were 12 percent of ARC records not released in full, or in federal governmentese, portions of these documents were “redacted”? The JFK Act allowed for postponing sensitive government and personal information in the records, up until a final release date of 26 October 2017. Departments, bureaus, and agencies were permitted to request redactions, subject to case-by-case review by the ARRB. Even though the ARRB established strict guidelines, 12 percent of the records met the board's criteria for postponements of one kind or another, for periods of time ranging from a few years up until October 2017.

    What has to be remembered though is that the ARRB was determined to release, before going out of business, any and all records judged central to the assassination story, and it succeeded in this task. Board members and staffers have always, and vigorously, defended the Board’s record in this regard. As ARRB chairman John Tunheim told author Vincent Bugliosi, “The Board protected [postponed] nothing, not one document or page, that was centrally related [emphasis added] to the facts of the assassination itself.”

    This key point cannot be stressed enough in any discussion of the ARC, although it is often ignored. The lengthy reviews and releases undertaken in 2017-2018 and afterward are important for completing the task set out in the JFK Act. But the key records, documents, artifacts that together constitute the basic facts have been accessible to the public since 1998, if not long before. Post-1998 releases have added interesting details here and there, but they have not changed our basic understanding of central facts. Nor will they ever do so in the future.

Ted Sorensen: Writer of History or Creator of It?

 

By Sheldon M. Stern

 

    In 1981, JFK Library director Dan Fenn informed me that the departments of State and Defense had signed off on declassifying the 43+ hours of White House tape recordings from the Cuban missile crisis. “You’re the historian,” he said, “listen to them.” For the greater part of the next two years, I became the first non-ExComm participant to listen to all the classified missile crisis tapes, as well as many other recorded meetings and private telephone conversations. It was a life-altering experience.[1]

    Nonetheless, even after all this time and study, a credible explanation for several of my personal Kennedy Library (JFKL) experiences remained elusive.

    In 1979, the JFKL was preparing to move from its temporary location in Waltham, Massachusetts to the permanent site at Columbia Point in Boston. Dave Powers, Jack’s former pal, and later the JFKL’s gatekeeper for the Kennedy family, was relaxing with a bottle of wine at a staff picnic. I casually asked about the controversy over whether JFK wrote the 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage. Powers smiled and replied, “Sheldon, do you really think that because I’ve had a bit to drink, I’m going to answer that?” The Kennedy family’s sensitivity on this question had already become well known.[2]

    JFK, a politician to the core, was always suspicious of the judgment and priorities of academic historians. In 1962, he groused to Professor David Herbert Donald about the facile hubris of historians’ surveys that rated presidents “below average” or as “failures.” He resented the whole process,” Donald vividly recalled. Kennedy relied instead on Ted Sorensen, my “intellectual blood bank,” and their relationship became virtually symbiotic. If JFK thought some document or statement should be put aside for the book they would later write about his administration—it was Sorensen he alerted. The president, during the missile crisis, had to admonish several ExComm members who questioned whether ‘speechwriter’ Sorensen should even attend these secret meetings. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Pulitzer Prize historian and White House special assistant, participated in just one meeting. Sorensen, however, was virtually omnipresent; he drafted messages to heads of state (including the letter to Nikita Khrushchev that led to a peaceful outcome), complex policy analyses and anything else required by the president at any time of day or night.

    In the mid-1980’s I flew to New York with a colleague for a meeting to reconsider opening some JFKL documents marked “personal.” Attorney Theodore Sorensen attended as well. After the committee’s business was concluded, food and ample drink were served; we called a cab to take us to the airport and offered to drop Sorensen off. Someone mentioned Profiles in Courage. Sorensen, perhaps less inhibited in this convivial atmosphere, suddenly exclaimed, “I wrote Profiles in Courage and much more,” followed by stunned and embarrassed silence. After we dropped him off, I wrote it down.

    Fast forward to 2007. Sorensen and I (my 2003 and 2005 books on the missile crisis had been published) were invited to speak at a Princeton University program to mark the 45th anniversary of the event. Sorensen was scheduled to be the first speaker. His assistant called to say they were stuck in traffic and the moderator asked me to speak first. About ten minutes into my remarks, the door to the theater opened and Sorensen came in on the arm of his assistant. (A stroke had damaged his optic nerve and left him blind.) He received a standing ovation from the audience and the panelists. Having arrived late, he had missed the introductions, and did not know exactly who was speaking. When I finished my account, Sorensen took the microphone and declared, “With all due respect, I am the only person in the room who was there in 1962.” He referred briefly to my “inaccurate” presentation and launched into a defense of the traditional Thirteen Days narrative: Bobby Kennedy as the leading opponent of military force, the importance of the celebrated “Trollope Ploy” in reaching a settlement, etc. During the Q&A after the panel, when my full name was mentioned, Sorensen added, “Oh, Sheldon, of course I know him. Wonderful book.” I passed a note to the moderator, “Should I take him on?” He shook his head, “no.”[3]

    When the program ended, Sorensen received another standing ovation and dozens of people lined up for questions or an autograph. No one asked about the tapes, and I was dismayed by the public appeal of celebrity over evidence. Is it possible to make sense of Sorensen’s reliance on these myths —a full decade after declassification of the ExComm recordings?

    The three episodes discussed above, it finally occurred to me, fit together much more coherently when viewed in the context of an earlier incident, then unknown to the public. In the spring of 1964, Attorney General Robert Kennedy turned up in Kenny O’Donnell’s office in the White House. (LBJ had persuaded key JFK men to stay on though the transition). RFK told O’Donnell that he had been working on a book about the missile crisis. White House staffer Dan Fenn later recalled that there had been many rumors about such a book—apparently intended for use in JFK’s 1964 reelection effort—just as the Kennedy campaigns had utilized John Hersey’s account of PT 109 in 1946 and Profiles in Courage in 1960. O’Donnell agreed to read the manuscript.

    When RFK returned, Fenn and O’Donnell’s secretary Pauline Fluet were also present. O’Donnell, known for his brusque, direct style, confronted RFK: “I thought your brother was president during the missile crisis?” “He’s not running, and I am,” [for the U.S. Senate from New York], Bobby replied, as Fenn recalled. Fluet cited a more personal, heartfelt response, “Jack wouldn’t mind.” RFK’s focus had apparently shifted from JFK’s reelection to his own political future. (After learning, decades ago, about the RFK-O’Donnell exchange from these two eyewitnesses, I searched without success in the relevant JFKL collections for any sign of the manuscript that RFK had brought to the White House in 1964).

    Dramatic evidence has survived that RFK’s personal political ambition was very much alive during the October 1962 crisis. Bobby told Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin that the secret US proposal to Moscow to inconspicuously remove the missiles from Turkey within a few months could not be revealed publicly and stressed that he could not “risk getting involved” in a possible leak “since who knows where and when…it can surface or be somehow published—not now, but in the future. The appearance of such a document could cause irreparable harm to my political career in the future.”[4]

    Barely a year after RFK’s death, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis appeared, and quickly became the go-to source—the only such account by a “key member” of the ExComm. In 1999, a new edition, with a preface by Professor Schlesinger, claimed that the recent evidence “supplements and reinforces Robert Kennedy’s account in Thirteen Days.” Both editions are all but silent on the role of Ted Sorensen in writing this astonishingly influential book. He is, in fact, all but invisible in Thirteen Days, except for a very brief signed note claiming that RFK “wrote this book in the summer and fall of 1967 . . . but never had an opportunity to rewrite or complete it.” Of course, this claim begs the inevitable question: then who did?[5]

    In his final 2008 memoir, Counselor: A Life on the Edge of History, Sorensen continued to cling to the “Trollope Ploy.” When Khrushchev publicly urged a trade of the Cuban missiles for NATO missiles in Turkey, JFK remained unmoved by RFK and Sorensen’s efforts to pressure him back to his earlier offer to remove the missiles in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba. The president reluctantly agreed to try their letter, “this thing,” as he dismissively called it; but his tone was skeptical and impatient [listen to the tapes!] and he continued, with Dean Rusk, to pursue diplomatic options well into the night.

    Sorensen’s memoir also repeated the false contention in Thirteen Days that RFK was the leader of the ExComm doves. The recordings prove incontrovertibly that RFK was a persistent hawk. On the first day, October 16, Bobby opposed bombing the Cuban missile sites: “You are going to kill an awful lot of people and take an awful lot of heat on it.” Schlesinger, who discovered this quote when researching his 1978 RFK biography, concluded “It was Robert Kennedy who stopped the air strike madness in its tracks.” RFK actually denounced the bombing as inadequate and instead demanded a full-scale military invasion of Cuba! On the last day, October 27, at the close of the final late evening meeting, McNamara urged massive, immediate, air and ground military intervention: “and then we have to have two things ready, a government for Cuba because we’re gonna need one after we go in with 500 aircraft. And secondly, some plans for how to respond to the Soviet Union in Europe, cause sure as hell they’re gonna do something there.” “I’d like to take Cuba back,” RFK mused, “That would be nice.” Someone teased that Bobby could be made mayor of Havana and the recording ended in a burst of nervous laughter.[6]

    RFK and Sorensen’s last-minute plan (the “Trollope Ploy”), affirmed in Thirteen Days and reaffirmed in Counselor some forty years later, allegedly preserved the peace on that climactic thirteenth day. “Our” [italics added] letter “to Khrushchev had worked,” Sorensen persisted. By continuing to defend this “brilliant ploy” after the ExComm recordings were declassified, Sorensen, in failing health, only managed to delay a full public reckoning with the startling new recorded evidence. As a result, Theodore C. Sorensen’s most consequential work remains at the “edge” rather than at “the epicenter” of the historical record—in service to the myths he crafted and defended to the end.

Sheldon M. Stern was John F. Kennedy Library Historian from 1977 to 2000 and is a member of Washington Decoded's editorial board.

 

[1] For a detailed description of that one-off, “fly on the wall” experience, see Sheldon M. Stern, Averting ‘the Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), xiii-xxx.

[2] John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (New York: Harper, 1956). David R. Stokes, JFK’s Ghost: Kennedy, Sorensen and the Making of Profiles in Courage (Guildford, CT: Lyons Press, 2021), is a thoroughly researched study concluding that Sorensen wrote the 1957 book. Biographer Herbert S. Parmet reached the same conclusion after reviewing the files in the Sorensen papers for Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial Press, 1980).

[3] On the evening of October 26, a worried Khrushchev sent a private message to Kennedy proposing to withdraw the missiles from Cuba in exchange for a US pledge not to invade the island. Hours later, Khrushchev stunned the ExComm by publicly offering via Moscow Radio a mutual withdrawal of the Cuban missiles and the NATO missiles in Turkey. The so-called “Trollope Ploy” (named for a literary conceit in which a casual interaction is willfully misconstrued as an offer of marriage) was the supposed plan to publicly accept the first, private offer while ignoring the second public message. JFK agreed to try this scheme, but was certain it would fail. The president and Secretary of State Dean Rusk privately pursued a secret, back-channel deal to remove the Turkish missiles soon after the Cuban missiles were withdrawn. But, the deal remained secret for decades and the “Trollope Ploy” lived on as the public explanation. See “The Trollope Ploy Myth,” in Sheldon M. Stern, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths Versus Reality (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012) 134-147.

[4] Stern, Averting the Final Failure, 403.

[5] Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969). Soon after the publication of Thirteen Days, former secretary of state Dean Acheson reacted to the claim that Dean Rusk “had other duties during this period of time and frequently could not attend the meetings.” Acheson sneered, “One wonders what those ‘other duties and responsibilities were,’ to be half so important as those they replaced.” Rusk, in fact, attended nineteen of the twenty meetings between October 16 and 27—missing only one because he was required by protocol to host a dinner for visiting Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. See, “The Real Robert Kennedy,” in Stern, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, 40-53.

[6] Schlesinger was given special access to the still classified RFK papers by the Kennedy family. He could not possibly have known the full content of the RFK quote he had discovered.

©2024 by Sheldon M. Stern

 

 

Bundy on Bundy: JFK’s National Security Adviser Listens to the Cuban Missile Crisis Recordings

 

 

 

By Sheldon M. Stern

 

    In the nearly three decades since the declassification of the secret recordings of the Cuban missile crisis ExComm meetings, I have often been asked if the recordings add anything vital to our grasp of that singular event. The answer is irrefutable: yes!

    That question also led me to wonder whether any of the key ExComm participants ultimately learned anything from the recordings. The tapes were not declassified until 1996 and by then most ExComm survivors were quite elderly. However, years earlier, McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s special assistant for national security, received clearance from the National Archives to listen to still-classified tapes from the first day (Tuesday, 16 October 1962) and also from the pivotal last day (Saturday, 27 October 1962).

    One afternoon in the 1980s I was surprised to see Bundy, then in his sixties, preparing to eat a meal in the Kennedy Library staff lunchroom. I introduced myself as the JFK Library historian, and explained that I had previously listened to the missile crisis tapes all the way through to the November lifting of the naval quarantine. Bundy looked incredulous at first, but after I alluded briefly to my background (Harvard PhD) he seemed more interested and at ease. Eventually, he acknowledged that he having difficulty identifying some speakers and I offered to help. Bundy had, of course, worked with these ExComm members and it almost seemed presumptuous for me to tell him who was talking. I explained, however, that when a speaker did not have a distinctive or familiar voice, I had compared it to other tape recordings on which the speakers were clearly identified, enabling me to recognize the voices of Paul Nitze, Roswell Gilpatric, John J. McCloy, U. Alexis Johnson, and several others. If the Boston twang of the Kennedy brothers occasionally made them difficult to distinguish, I was usually able to examine the context of the discussion to determine whether the president or attorney general was speaking.

    Bundy and I spent six absorbing hours in the classified national security vault listening to the October 27th tapes. He had been, the recordings proved, a consistently tough and outspoken critic of the president’s views—which was, of course, his job as White House national security adviser. He knew that JFK did not wish to be surrounded by sycophants. Bundy was also the only participant who openly questioned the president’s judgment and decisions by frequently using the personal pronoun “I” to explain what “I myself would do” in this situation—leading the president to respond impatiently, “I want everybody to understand it, Mac, if you don’t mind.”[1]

    “There may be an advantage,” Bundy suggested in his memoir, “in combining in one account what I know as a participant and what I have since learned from the work of others and from my own study.” These formerly top-secret recordings thoroughly document Bundy’s distinctive role during the ominous October 27th meetings—revised and corrected by the startling new evidence on these scratchy, low fidelity, but irreplaceable and indispensable recordings.[2]

    The most widely-read book about the crisis has been Robert F. Kennedy’s Thirteen Days. It has never been out of print; created the interpretive paradigm for the crisis; and inspired several documentaries and two Hollywood films. Yet many of its key conclusions have been exposed as flatly untrue by the tapes. RFK appears to have chosen to settle personal scores with argumentative participants like Bundy—accusing him “of strange flip-flops . . . . First, he was for a [missile] strike, then a blockade and then for doing nothing . . . because it would upset the situation in Berlin, and then, finally, he led the group which was in favor of an air strike . . . without prior notification, along the lines of Pearl Harbor.” He also claimed that Bundy “had been irresolute or weak-willed.”[3]

    The decisive moment of the crisis arrived on Friday evening, October 26, when Khrushchev sent a lengthy, emotional message to Washington. He insisted that the missiles in Cuba were defensive and proposed removing them in exchange for a US pledge not to invade the island. The next morning the ExComm was stunned to learn about an entirely new offer, made publicly on Moscow Radio, to remove the Cuban missiles if the US removed its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. The president immediately asked what negotiations had taken place with the Turks, noting that he had been considering such a move since the first day of the crisis. Bundy urged JFK not to soften his resolve and asserted that “I would stick to the terms in the Friday letter.” The president insisted that world opinion would back the trade—because “it will look like a very fair trade . . . . you’re going to find a lot of people thinking this is a rather reasonable position.” “That’s true,” Bundy conceded, but “privately we say to Khrushchev: ‘Look, your statement is very dangerous . . . You’d better get straightened out . . . . The current threat to peace is not in Turkey—it is in Cuba.’ JFK countered, “They’ve got a God[damn] . . . they’ve got a very good proposal, which is the reason they’ve made it public.”

    Bundy soon reported that he had contacted the US ambassadors to France and NATO “who confirmed that the “knockdown of the Cuba-Turkey link” had been well-received by the allies. No such inquiry had been explicitly authorized by the president at the ExComm meetings, yet JFK did not comment on or make an issue of Bundy’s potential brush with insubordination.

    “It’s one thing to stand them down,” Bundy repeated, “to reduce the likelihood of a Soviet attack on Turkey . . . . It’s quite another thing to trade them out.” But Kennedy countered again that “most people will regard this as not an unreasonable proposal, I’ll . . . tell you that!” Bundy remained unconvinced: “But what ‘most people’ Mr. President?” JFK shot back, “I think you’re gonna have it very difficult to explain [Kennedy often fractured grammar in tense moments] why we are going to take hostile military action in Cuba . . . when he’s saying, ‘If you get yours out of Turkey, I’ll get ours out of Cuba.’ I think you’ve got a very tough one here. Let’s not kid ourselves”—a remark he repeated three times. “I don’t see why we pick that track,” Bundy persisted, “when he’s offered us the other track in the last twenty-four hours.” JFK cut him off, “Well, he’s offered us a new one! . . . in fact, all these matters can be discussed if he’ll cease work [in Cuba].” Then the president paused dramatically for about six seconds before concluding bleakly, “And then where are we? . . . if that’s part of the record, then you don’t have a very good war.” “NATO may be firm now,” he warned, in language evocative of his letters home during World War II, but “we all know how quickly everybody’s courage goes when the blood starts to flow.”

    “I myself,” Bundy pronounced again, would send back word that they have to do better than this public statement . . . and get [Khrushchev] back to where he was last night. JFK recommended requesting an emergency Sunday meeting of the NATO council. “No,” Bundy countered, “I would not do it tomorrow, Mr. President, myself!” JFK ignored him, reiterating that “time is running out . . . . It’s got to be finessed. We have to finesse [Khrushchev].” The national security chief remained convinced that NATO would conclude that “we were trying to sell out our allies for our interests. It’s irrational, and it’s crazy, but it’s a terribly powerful fact.”

    The tapes confirm that Kennedy was convinced that the Soviet premier would not, and could not, return to his Friday proposal after moving on to a tougher public position on Saturday. RFK and special assistant Ted Sorensen urged the president to send a letter to persuade Khrushchev to return to the Friday proposal. Kennedy agreed to send it, but his indifferent tone suggests no confidence in that idea; he referred to the letter as “this thing.” JFK was certain that political pressure around the world would make it impossible for Khrushchev to swallow an offer he had abandoned.

    Some readers may be wondering about the so-called “Trollope Ploy”—a scheme designed to assist the administration in concealing the truth about the secret deal that ended the crisis. Thirteen Days credits RFK with the idea. JFK, however, phoned former presidents Eisenhower, Truman, and Hoover on Sunday and lied about the deal, insisting that he had pressured Khrushchev back to the Friday proposal. Ike was impressed: “this is a very conciliatory move he’s made”—the “Trollope Ploy” before it had a name.[4]

    Bundy’s memoir largely ignored his abrasive and officious exchanges with the president. That regrettable decision deprived historians and the public, before the tapes were available, of unique evidence and insight into the personal, emotional, and human realities of these discussions. (The possibility that Bundy acted as ExComm “devil’s advocate” is effectively belied by these taut, quarrelsome recorded clashes.)

    Bundy stood by the 1962 US line that “the crisis was brought on” by Khrushchev. “We have a list of sabotage options, Mr. President,” which included removing Castro. “I think it would need your approval . . . . Post-Castro Cuba, is the most complex landscape.” JFK concurred that Khrushchev had “initiated the danger . . . he’s the one playing God, not us.” These covert US schemes, kept secret from the American people, were no secret to the USSR and Cuba, and help explain Khrushchev’s gamble to protect Cuba with Soviet missiles.

    The international political appeal of Khrushchev’s Saturday message, Bundy reluctantly agreed, had negated the first proposal “Yet, in the end,” he concluded, “President Kennedy not only chose that [public] course but recognized the importance of giving it clear [public] priority over any effort to persuade the Turks” to accept a missile trade. In fact, this was a shrewd and devious half-truth. JFK never expected the ploy to succeed—a fact Bundy well understood. Yet the president used the Friday letter gambit (as he had done in the call to the former presidents) as a public cover story to conceal the behind-the-scenes Turkey-Cuba trade.

    Bundy was impressed by the contributions of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who resisted the missile trade during the meetings, but also shared the president’s aversion to allowing “an intransigent position on these unwanted weapons stand between his country and the safe removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba . . . [which] was worth many times any possible cost.”
Bundy’s own judgment, a quarter century later, echoed both JFK and Rusk:

   Kennedy’s understanding of the political power of Khrushchev’s second letter made him pessimistic about the prospect of success in returning to the first . . . .  Twenty-five years have passed, and I find myself less impressed by my own insistence on the reality of NATO sentiment than I am by the president’s unwavering recognition that the basic interest of all concerned was to find a peaceful end to the crisis and that the Turkish missiles, whatever the opinions of allies, did not justify bloodshed in Cuba.[5]

 

Sheldon M. Stern was John F. Kennedy Library Historian from 1977-2000. He had the unique opportunity to hear and evaluate all the Cuban missile crisis recordings two decades before they were declassified. He is the author of Averting the Final Failure: JFK and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (2003);  The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis (2005); and The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths vs. Reality (2012).

 

[1] Sheldon M. Stern, “The Selective Memory of McGeorge Bundy,” in The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, Myths vs. Reality (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 119-128.

[2] McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988) 391.

[3] Sheldon M. Stern, “Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors: The Real JFK White House Cuban Missile Crisis,” in Len Scott and R. Gerald Hughes, eds., The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Critical Reappraisal (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2015) 204-224.

[4] Stern, “The Trollope Ploy Myth,” Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, 134-147.

[5] Bundy, Danger and Survival, 430, 436.

©2024 by Sheldon M. Stern